About

"I have no clue what I'm doing. Learning and making it up as I go along."

Intro

The TNINE Ternary Computer is a hobby project that I have been working on since 2014 in my spare time. It started as a thought experiment and was a graph paper doodle project during boring college classes.

I've wanted to make some kind of DIY breadboard or discrete component computer for a long time but there is already an ocean of hobby 8 and 16-bit projects out there. (https://hackaday.io has many.) I wanted to do something original.

A base three computer seemed like a cool idea. I figured out on my own on paper the truth tables for the logic gates SUM, CON, and ANY although I didn't come up with those names. A full adder has the same layout for ternary as it does for binary. This showed me a ternary computer was possible.

After a few Google searches on Ternary I found the website The Ternary Manifesto by Douglas W. Jones. This site goes over the foundations of a ternary computer starting from useful logic gates and their truth tables, some historical references, adders, and more.

There does not appear to be a lot of publicly accessible information online on ternary computers. Because of the lack of existing information, I have had to teach myself binary computing and then reinvent the binary wheel in ternary.

Previous Name

This project was previously named T729. This was the original name since the start of this project. However, the name was based off the Magic Number and the width of instructions, 6-trits (3^6 = 729). In the first quarter of 2025 I decided to increase the width of this project to 9-trits and renamed to T9.

Reason

I was getting stuck with instruction layout, choosing memory modes, and designing an instruction decoder. Having 729 possible instructions would allow for a large tool-set of instructions but I would have to have many duplicate instructions for the different memory modes, and not all would follow a consistent pattern.

Expanding to 9-trits allows for 6-trits for opcodes and 3-trits for modes. The 729 possible instructions remains but now there is room for twenty-seven modes that are much easier to decode.

Contact

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nary

wiki

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dyne

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net

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